Does NFL-Style Bullying Happen in Women's Locker Rooms Too?

Miami Dolphin Jonathan Martin quit the team after relentless bullying from his teammate, Richie Incognito. Former NFL-ers say it's just locker room culture. So what goes down in the locker rooms of female pro athletes?

"Take a little boy and a little girl. A little boy falls down and the first thing we say as parents is 'Get up, shake it off. You'll be OK. Don't cry.' When a little girl falls down, what do we say? 'It's going to be OK.' We validate their feelings. So right there from that moment, we're teaching our men to mask their feelings, don't show their emotions. And it's that times 100 with football players. You can't show that you're hurt, you can't show any pain. So for a guy to come into the locker room and he shows a little vulnerability, that's a problem. That's what I mean by the culture of the NFL. And that's what we have to change."

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Is it this kind of macho posturing that's making pro-football a hostile work environment for Martin and, presumably, others? Do female professional athletes deal with the same kind of ribbing and hazing that Martin allegedly had to endure? I spoke to a former rugby player, a women's tackle-football player (yes, they exist), a captain of the women's USA hockey team, and a former pro-soccer player and current coach to see if women's locker room culture is really so wildly different than men's.

Two of the athletes I spoke to—Meghan Duggan, a 2010 Olympic silver medalist in hockey and captain of the women's national team, and Amanda Cromwell, the current head coach of the UCLA soccer team and a former pro soccer player—said they never experienced or observed any kind of bullying or harassment. There wasn't all that much time spent in locker rooms to begin with, Cromwell said, it was "pregrame, postgame shower and we're out of there." With the NFL, the players have to be together a lot more, which could make a toxic culture worse.

What time was spent in those locker rooms was overwhelmingly positive. Cromwell even remembers players baking cookies for each other. Casey Fields, who played women's premiere league rugby, says that her teams didn't even have the money to have locker rooms most of the time, but the culture of her teams as an adult was wonderful. In general, "Women are sensitive and nice and into each other's needs," Fields said.

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The only woman I spoke to who experienced bullying as a pro or semi-pro was Liz Sowers, who played semi-pro women's tackle football and is on the U.S. National women's rugby team. She said there were times she witnessed bullying, "where teammates would be the butt of a joke for so long they finally snapped." But it seems like it was easier for women to stand up for themselves in response without getting accused of being 'soft,' as Jonathan Martin has been.

While all the female athletes I spoke to said there was a good deal of good-natured ribbing going on in behind the scenes in women's sports, it was never offensive in the way that Richie Incognito said is the norm for men's locker rooms. Amanda Cromwell said she's always had lesbian teammates, and that it was never ever an issue. There has never been an out NFL player, and though some high-profile football players are gay allies, there's still a great deal of homophobia lurking. Which goes back to Brandon Marshall's original statement: Any behavior that makes you seem like less of a stereotypical tough guy is not welcomed in the NFL.

Ex-NFL player Nate Jackson argued in New York Magazine that "civilized, harmonious workers and model citizens off the field will never be the savage beasts on the field. You can't have both," something rugby player Casey Fields takes issue with. "Rugby is more physical than football. There's more contact in rugby, and there's no padding. So you have to be more aggressive and physical for survival purposes," Fields says. "You need to be mentally tough, that it doesn't mean you have to be mentally abusive."

In a way, it might be easier for women to be fierce athletes on the field and to leave the aggression there. There are fewer cultural—and let's be honest, financial— expectations on female professional athletes, so there's less pressure on them to behave a certain way. "There was none of that dominance stuff," Cromwell says, perhaps alluding to a need among male athletes to stand out and show up at all costs. Furthermore, there's no nationally ingrained image of a women's professional rugby player in the same way there are ingrained images of what an NFL star is supposed to be. Let's hope the current discussion swirling around the Incognito-Martin kerfuffle changes that frozen image into something that can move and evolve.